To nuke or not to nuke: Bush decides 
Cover story 
Andrew Stephen 
Monday 17th April 2006 

          There will be an attack; that much is already assumed in Washington. Whether it should be nuclear is a matter of intense debate. The verdict may depend upon the wild card of the president's Messianic complex. By Andrew Stephen 
          So the Third World War is imminent and the madman in the White House bunker is about to nuke Iran. That, at least, is the message from the veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. The American media, however, seem far less concerned than the British: on the morning the story was making headlines in the UK, Iran did not even make the front pages of the Washington Post or New York Times. "Military fantasies on Iran", a New York Times editorial sniffed on 11 April. 

So who is right? Is this news or not? It depends on your point of departure. This may surprise people in Britain, but Washington is already working from the assumption that the US will launch some form of conventional-weapon attack on Iran during this presidency. That much is not news here. Indeed, the Bush administration is assuming that when that attack happens it will have the support of Britain and Australia. 

Nuclear weapons, however, are another matter. Whether they might be used against Iran is a critical issue in the struggle under way between foreign-policy pragmatists and ideological zealots. Washington is divided between these two camps, of which the former is by far the bigger. It consists of sensible people inside the administration itself, the State Department, CIA, Pentagon and the powerful think-tanks, and its numbers are growing exponentially as the president's incompetence becomes undeniable to all but the most fanatical. Every day brings more defections. Even Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, has fallen out with Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and is on the verge of abandoning the ideological ship - just as Colin Powell did in private over Iraq, but not publicly until it was far too late. 

The second Washington faction is tiny, but unstable and dangerous. It consists of a tiny handful of people. Only last month, after watching the German film Downfall, I wrote of the White House as a bunker, because that is what it is like: Bush, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, attended by a dwindling band of neoconservatives, sit in their bunker, increasingly detached from reality, still insisting on viewing the world and plotting its course as they choose to do, unhindered by inconvenient realities. (American readers: I am not saying that Bush is like Hitler, but referring to the bunker mentality.) 

The first faction overwhelmingly agrees with the British, French and German view that Iran must be isolated diplomatically rather than militarily, and it is solidly behind the tough UN Security Council statement of 29 March on Iran. Its members are terrified, however, that in the meantime the madmen in the bunker will lose it completely. Jack Straw is echoing their view when he says it is "completely nuts" to think that the United States is contemplating a pre-emptive nuclear strike; his conduit into the Bush administration is the increasingly marginalised Rice - in effect now a member of faction number one. 

The second faction . . . well, who can peer into the mind of George W Bush? I doubt if the 43rd president himself knows whether the US will launch nuclear missiles at Iran. (It would be reassuring, by the way, to add that the Democrats comprise a third influential faction, except that these days they barely figure on Washington's political map.) 

The uncertainties leave a vacuum between pessimists and optimists. There are many, including people at the United Nations, who believe that Bush can and will press the nuclear button. Yet a clear majority in Washington believes that an all-powerful establishment, from the might of the top brass at the Pentagon to the consensus wisdom of practically every senior politician, will prevail against even an out-of-control president. 

We cannot be totally confident that Sy Hersh has got it completely right, either. The 69-year-old reporter is rightly admired for his countless scoops, from the My Lai massacre in 1968 to the Abu Ghraib outrages 35 years later. But he has also made mistakes: he had to write a 3,000-word retraction for the New York Times in 1981 after getting the Pinoc 
          Read more from the latest issue of the New Statesman

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition. 

		
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